RuPaul’s Drag Race

It is true: one of my many areas of bizarre and pervasive fascination—I’ve mentioned fetus in fetu already—is drag queens. I love both who they are and what they represent: unabashedly confident, over-the-top, owning-their-shit, larger-than-life women of the fiercest kind. Most drag personas exist outside of the gender binary: certainly not male, but somehow not exactly female, either. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some drag queens that perform with the goal of “passing”—as the incredible 1990 documentary about ball culture Paris is Burning highlights with the “realness” category—but on the whole, drag, to me, is about expressing yourself in an incredibly subversive way.

So it should be no surprise that my new favorite show is “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which airs Monday nights on Logo (you can also watch full episodes on the show’s website). Even after watching just two episodes, I’m basically in love. The thing that makes this show so great is that it is like “America’s Next Top Model” (which is one of my favorite shows), but—if you can believe it—even more over the top. It’s what ANTM would be like if Tyra could say just what she was thinking, the show had absolutely no budget*, and the whole thing was run by drag queens. OH WAIT.

A few of the best moments:

Ongina (my favorite so far) in episode 1: “I’m so excited I could drip!” Also, in the second episode, she has this face:

while uttering the words, “I will cut somebody!” What a sweetheart!

When one of the judges in episode 1 critiqued an outfit by saying, “It just looks a little cheap. It looks like you’re ready to give a $20 blow job,” RuPaul corrects him by saying, “That’s…not a bad thing…”

A sexy car wash photo shoot in the first episode caused Ru to quip to one of the contestants, “I think you may need to take a pregnancy test!”

In episode 2, a cheap but amusing pun (because seriously, what is drag on television if not one gigantic hour-long pun?): RuPaul’s version of the TyraMail is called SheMail.

A RuPaul catchphrase: “And remember: DON’T FUCK IT UP.” You know Tyra would say that to the contestants if only she wasn’t on the CW. And trying to retain some illusion of seriousness.

Another line Tyra wishes she could say: Ru’s response to a judge that asserts his opinion about who he knows should go home: “Well, you don’t know anything because it’s my decision.”

And finally, the loveliest send-off of all—one that so succinctly articulates why it is I love drag culture—is RuPaul again: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the HELL you gonna love someone else??”

*The fact that this show is not only a totally-over-the-top version of ANTM, but also the totally broke-down version, is unintentionally hillarious. Case in point: the “photoshoot” challenge in Ep2 had each contestant holding a digital camera at arm’s length and taking pictures of themselves mugging to an “emotion” RuPaul would call out, like “Someone just cut the cheese!” (I’m serious.) Budget? What budget?